Welcome!

Welcome to Diferior!

After three years of silence I have decided to make it official, that, unfortunately, Diferior is officially dead and will no longer be maintained.

The reason being is that while it amassed a great community and I am still very proud to have initiated something as influential as this, I simply no longer have the time to continue working on it.When I started the project, I was seventeen - so I was able to justify donating a chunk of my free time while expecting nothing in return. Nowadays, I spend all my time working on my startup, so I can no longer actively participate in this project.

I would like to extend my thanks to everybody who supported and believed in the project, to the few donors that contributed financially and to all Diferior users, who, even to this day, continue to use the CMS. It's been a pleasure. Honestly.

P.S. While the Diferior, as it stands currently, has been discontinued, I would still love to contribute to the open-source community in the future. I do have a few ideas and you should follow me on twitter to be one of the first people to find out what they are.

Released back in 2007, after spending over two long months brewing up, Diferior now returns - harder, better, faster, stronger, as they say.

For those of you unfamiliar with the project, by definition Diferior (different + superior, get it?) is a multi-purpose content management system, meaning that it provides all the necessary tools to easily publish and organize your content. What is so special about it, you ask? Well, this is not your ordinary blog CMS. In fact, it is capable of distributing files via BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP protocols, has inbuilt forums, a sophisticated user system and many many more features that each can be tweaked, customized or disabled altogether.You can run torrent trackers, blogs, forums and other community-based sites with it.

Diferior drops the 'beta' tag from its name and adapts an ubuntu-like version number, consisting of release year and month (hence v8.03). Although I do not want to discourage you, as excessive beta-testing has proven, bugs sprout up in the most unexpected places. If you manage to run into one, do not hesitate and report it in the forums. I will personally help you patch up the problem.

Now onto the fun stuff. 8.03 introduces many new features:

PortabilityEven though I have tested the previous beta release on different server configurations, some people still ran into trouble setting it up. 8.03 should work on any server that is capable of running PHP 5.2+ (with GD module) and MySQL database. Mod_rewrite dependency has been removed (although it's still highly recommended).

Improved torrent tracker backend supportThe previous beta worked only with a modified XBTT tracker. This release supports almost any possible tracker backend. Running a public tracker? Use OpenTracker. Don't have GCC access? Use PHP tracker. Server load problems? Use XBTT. Furthermore, you are able to configure Diferior to work with anonymous public (a.k.a external) trackers, e.g. denis.stalker.h3q.com or open.tracker.thepiratebay.org. Not only will this relieve your server from IP-address crunching duty, it might also add another layer of legal safety, so to speak (*cough*).

TaggingYou will now be able to assign tags to blog posts and downloads. A significant addition for sites with loads of content. No longer will you have to decide which single category your submission best represents. Simply add some keywords to the tags field and it's all good.

Anonymous commentsEncouraging users to express themselves is essential for any growing community. Anonymous commenting is sort of "try before you buy" solution, allowing users to easily voice themselves on a particular matter, without going through a (~minute long) registration process.

IP-address hashingWith this option turned on, Diferior will hash client IP-addresses, instead of storing them in plain text. Since hashes are impossible to decrypt, your users will feel much safer about their privacy. Note that server configuration is still up to the server administrator, as it's way out of any regular WEB CMS's league.

Improved templatingWhile Diferior has a sophisticated templating system, introducing and distributing quick hacks to existing skins can be cumbersome. 8.03 has some improvements in it's template handling system which allow inclusions of extra stylesheets for current templates, thus enabling designers to code their own layouts and color schemes without messing with HTML or Smarty tags.

Forums improvementsWith forum search, "quote" and "edit post" buttons it is now much easier to follow and participate in discussions. There are also some minor UI fixes, that make forums so much more fun to use.

Private messagingThis one was probably among top-requested features. Well, it's finally here. You can send, receive and reply to private messages, engage into personal conversations with other users or simply notify members of something. In case you're concerned about your users flooding each other, don't - there's a customizable PM box limit, as well as anti-flood control system.

Bugfixes, other tweaksThere's a lengthy changelog in the README file, that is attached to the download archive. Many small tweaks and fixes in this release. You can check it out, if you're a sucker for details

Even although this is a major release, I'm not yet done and have some pretty big plans and features planned out for Diferior. Got any suggestions? Feel free to chime in.

Big thanks to Ernesto from TorrentFreak for supporting Diferior, witkuz for designing the logo (and "Skio Four" template), Rytis for helping out with diferior.lt, beta testers for contributing their time to test-drive pre-release versions of Diferior.

I am glad to announce that new Diferior version is finally with testers. Preliminary testing was a success and script is scheduled to release to public in the beginning of March.

Not only Diferior drops 'beta' with the next release, it also introduces a ton of new features. I won't spoil the fun and let you dig around the new, updated, diferior.com yourselves. You are welcome to post your findings in the comments.

I proudly present you the result of many sleepless nights and countless caffeine injections - first ever public Diferior BETA.

You might want to skip straight to downloads:

Perhaps the best way to explain Diferior is through it's name. 'Diferior' is a mix of two words - different and superior. And that's basically what it is. It's different and therefore superior. It's superior, but in a different way.

Diferior's distinction comes from it's approach to the problem. It's not attempting to one-up or imitate a well-established CMS. Instead, Diferior targets a quite uncrowded, but vast, niche.

Diferior does what it does really well - interesting mashup of seemingly unrelated functionality delivers a remarkable user-experience.